Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Notes on Lara Glenum's MAXIMUM GAGA

The back cover of Lara Glenum's MAXIMUM GAGA reads like this, and only this:

INTERVIEW WITH THE QUEEN ON NATIONAL TV

Q: Is it really necessary to make such abominations?A: It is absolutely necessary to make such abominations.

The selection of this excerpt from the text serves as both a warning and a pleasure outline: what you are going to see here is going to squirm inside you, and stay there well after you have read it: if you are not ready to be gripped in the text fists an abomination, do not pick up the book: but you must pick up the book.

In 110 pages Lara Glenum has calcified the remains of what she might have in her sleep licked out of the head of one of the 1500 brains that died trapped inside the body of Gilles Deleuze's suicide, flushed from the spewmater of Lewis Carroll's brain damaged brother's long-rotten LSD baked corpse, and churned together with the sugars of recalled candy wiped out whole middle schools in Japan.

These are poems that as they create their world among the lines become banned inside the created land as soon as the land therein hears itself.

The terrain of the book is filled with malformed sexual machines, Sade-ian cartoon demons with child names like Minky Momo and Seven Cunt Mary and the Bull. There is a stage play that seems implicating in and on the poems as if by quasi-candied-dictatorial reign, which then scourges itself in and of the poems as if it is one of them.

There is the presence of a 'Normopath' which is used both as an insult and as slang and as a presence that destroys. It also seems to fear itself and want to fuck itself. It also seems to have the power to enter the text's reader.

This book gives David Cronenberg nightmares that make him come cotton candy oil, and then he eats it thinking it is coffee and he has more power to make films.

The problem with a lot of popular 'violent' literature like Bret Easton Ellis and whoever else people who like films like 'Sin City' read is that the violence alone can be removed from the language and used as dudism blockades that in the end don't get a lot further than the films that are eventually made of them.

Extracting the true viscera out of the unclean act by NEVER INSERTING THE TRUE UNCLEAN renders the truly brutal act another popcorn poppy.

This is why when Lara Glenum on page 74 of this masterwork writes:

I saw myself dressed in pink-eye & tumors: modelingthe latest vivisection device: : I saw myself lying on a gurneysurrounded by deer in white jackets : My spine being pulled out myasshole : like a string of diamonds :

I am left feeling giggilyly violated, in the way of having actually read something that enacted the act of what it was saying by saying it in such a way that I could not thereafter shake the verbiage from my head.

This book is filled with such intuitive demon imagery a la Kenneth Anger's camera splitting and the albino man touching his forehead with a clear bar

or the twisted colors of Fassbinder's films that make me nauseated just by looking at a few frames.

Even the punctuation here (which looks different in the book, but blogger's formatting issue is keeping you safe), the seemingly listless colons floating between the self defacement like organs shat out of the body, sits in my teeth in the way of a bit of food that I can not get out and over time will rot my teeth to shit.

Everyone in this book I think fucked machines for so long they resorted to new methods, there is a scene where a machine is pumping a body full of cream.

The sex words that proliferate here fuck themselves while stung up with childlike playsong and the various contortions of the body against itself and against a soft substance that in our world few have yet to realize we can't see.

In the same way as a child I checked out a copy of Stephen King's 'IT' from the library and didn't even open it, I left it on my desk and at night I could hear it talking to me and I never read the book until years later, and it scared me so much more before I opened it, MAXIMUM GAGA won't stop talking to me when its pages are closed, and this is after I have read it, and the things it says to me scare in ways that make my body crimp in little waves of gunk or something, and I have the book now resting on my chest and may sleep this way.

Someone sat on my copy of MAXIMUM GAGA when I had passengers who got into my backseat where I keep the books I am about to read and the books I have already read and want to continue to have near me.

Whoever sat in the backseat crumpled the corner of MAXIMUM GAGA is going to develop an ass rash that as it ripens will eject $$$ and they will be very rich and they will buy a machine that makes babies they can destroy.

I will press this book on people who I love and who need more.

Lara Glenum's MAXIMUM GAGA is both a masterwork of the new grotesque, of innovation in lymph-adhering language, and a much needed kick in the lips for even those already in the business of wanting to kick lips without disrupting their own terror coma.

I want you, need you, to buy this book, so that it will feel distracted with new attention and stop humping my leg (please don't stop humping my leg).